


What They Didn't Know

by gingergenower



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Fighting, Violence, post winter soldier, seriously lots of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-06
Updated: 2016-08-06
Packaged: 2018-07-29 18:17:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7694527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gingergenower/pseuds/gingergenower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They all have their theories, but no one quite knows what's running through Steve's mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What They Didn't Know

**Author's Note:**

> Post Winter Soldier, it's got Vision in too so I guess post Avengers: Age of Ultron but like, there isn't anything else that's plot-important.  
> Steve's keeping an eye out for information on Bucky.

The truth of it was, they didn’t know.

Natasha saw flickers of it, in the tightness of his eyes when someone said his name. She thought it was grief, tendrils wrapped up his spine and he couldn’t move in fear of it, couldn’t breathe lest they squeezed. Neither of them were tactile, but once she cupped his cheek and held his gaze and he relaxed into a smile. It was sad, but he was there, with her. She was wrong.

Sam thought Steve’s guilt was a weight on his shoulders. There were no vines there, only cracks and fractures in the vertebrae, but the man hadn’t endured the process of becoming a supersoldier through pain relief. His resiliency in body only matched his determination, and he had walked for twenty seven years with that on him. Sam wished he could carry it, but he couldn’t, because that wasn’t why Steve’s jaw clenched.

Vision knew Captain America was a very lonely man; he’d cultivated a small life for himself, in a nondescript area of Washington, planted seeds there and only saw the first blooms of life before somebody squashed them back into the mud. He hadn’t tried again, probably too afraid to- but that presumed Steve Rogers, skinny kid from Brooklyn, NY, understood fear.

They were on board the quinjet, Sam rolling his shoulders and adjusting his wings, Natasha zipping her suit up, Vision quiet in the corner. Steve was talking, and had been for five minutes.

“-so if there’s a problem-”

“On the coms,” Sam said, nodding. “Don’t worry, we got it.”

Steve raised an eyebrow. “I was gonna say keep it yourself.”

Grinning, Sam slapped his shoulder and lined himself with the hatch, already open.

“Alright boys,” Natasha said. “This is HYDRA skies now.”

Sam launched himself out of the open hatch, and they heard a distant whoop, and Vision melted through the floor and disappeared. Natasha slid into the pilot seat, counting to twenty in her head.

“Are you holding on?”

“You’re not a gentle driver,” Steve said, shrugging, adjusting his grip on a strap attached to the ceiling and the other fixing his helmet.

Natasha smirked, steeping into a decline that left Steve clinging for balance and staggering on their levelling out, finally touching down.

“Pretty sure Sam dived slower than that,” Steve muttered, shield in hand and creeping out of the quinjet, assuming she was at his heels. She was quieter than him. The quinjet was on stealth mode, but surprise was key.

Underfoot, the grass was wet with dew, the sky unpolluted by light in this field in the middle of Maine and stars twinkling above them, but Natasha’s phone told them they were less than thirty feet from the entrance to the base. They were coming to a thick line of trees, and Natasha nodded towards them.

“ _Three of them were outside the door,_ ” Sam’s voice told them, and Natasha would have winced if that kind of news intimidated her.

“So not empty?” Steve said.

“ _Not so much_ ,” Sam said. " _But those three are taking a nap in the next field over._ ”

“Vision?”

“ _I encountered four men patrolling around the perimeter_.”

“This changes things. Vision, outside to pick off stragglers. Sam, take the roof- create a distraction, take as many of them out as you can. Natasha and I will take the front door.”

They all assented, and Natasha found the front door and bypassed their security systems in under a minute. Gunfire on the roof made Steve bite his lip, but they could hear Sam’s yelled taunts.

Natasha met the first guard at the door with a punch to the face, kick to the groin, and a hand slamming him to the ground by the throat. Steve knocked the second out with a flick of his wrist and a perfectly landed hit with the shield over Natasha’s head, and the corridor fell silent, stretched ahead of them, a staircase to the left.

Natasha pointed- the signal, the whole reason they were there- was down the corridor. Steve nodded, and she disappeared down the hallway, and Steve mimicked her lightness of foot up the steps.

***

This old HYDRA base kept releasing signals. They were impossible to decrypt, changing under their feet at as soon as they stopped stumbling, but it was nuggets of information, or intel, or plans, and they needed to stop feeding their other heads. Steve suggested it first, unlikely to be manned by more than a few people, probably nothing more than a glorified radio station.

They were wrong. There were 44 people manning this base: 17 on the third floor, sprinting their way up to the firefight on the roof; 4 on the second floor, in big open offices without a clue the firefight was happening; 16 on the first floor and 7 scattered in the surrounding fields.

Steve knew the team speculated on why he was so quiet, on why he didn’t relax with them, or really have a life at all. Grief, guilt or loneliness would all be valid reasons. He would accept them if they were his, but Steve dropped the shield at the top of the steps because Howard didn’t design that shield for this.

***

Wiping the blood off the blade on her suit, Natasha sheathed her knife and picked the gun she’d been forced to drop and reloaded it. She plugged in a memory stick to the computer, and in moments JARVIS’ calm voice informed her that the building had been hijacked and all the computerized information destroyed. The stick wiped itself afterwards, but she took it back anyway and pocketed it. Better to leave yourself as untraceable as possible. 

Gun in hand, she paused at the bottom of the stairs. Sam mentioned about their dwindling numbers, but Steve hadn’t chimed in since he went upstairs, and she couldn’t hear a murmur from the floor above her. Treading up the steps, she nearly stood on the shield and pulled the gun up, clearing the room. One unconscious HYDRA operative splayed across a desk, shirt torn and purpling bruising across her forehead and down the side of her face.

Natasha whipped around, a grunt faint from the next room. Gun trained in front of her, she crept through the open door.

Two more operatives, all wearing expensive suits instead of the black tactical gear she expected. One of them stirred, so she slammed him around the head with the butt of her gun. He’d be unconscious a while longer.

She heard a voice. Yet another door open. She followed the breadcrumbs, and it was Steve, and her gun wavered.

Lip bleeding, he leant over the last operative in the room. Shoulder popped out of its socket, wrist at a strange angle and curled up to her chest, she glared up at Steve, a hand pinning her legs down and the other wrapped around her throat.

Neither of them noticed Natasha.

“Have you heard anything about him?” Steve said, fingers adjusting a little. Tightening.

“I wouldn’t tell you if I had.”

She smirked, and Natasha flinched at the rasp in her voice. He wasn’t applying pressure to the carotid arteries, he was deliberately pinching the trachea. Natasha wouldn’t be surprised if he had enough strength in his fingers alone to collapse it.

Steve shifted, standing and dragging her up with him, pinning her to wall by her throat in one motion, her feet five inches from the floor. Natasha couldn’t see his face, but his arm was straight, and the operative’s eyes bulged while she scrabbled for purchase.

“The human body has incredible endurance,” he said, conversationally. “Do you want to test yours?”

She tried to kick him.

Both hands wrapped around her throat, he launched her across the room. She slammed against the opposite wall, dropping to the floor with a thud.

He stalked around the desk in the middle of the room, not even pausing on seeing Natasha.

“Falcon might need your help. Go.”

“Rogers-”

“That’s an order.”

He stood the operative back up, her knees wobbly, her forehead cut, looking dazed.

“You can’t-”

Steve ignored Natasha. “You can make this very short for yourself. Do you know what happened to him?”

She swallowed, eyes sliding in and out of focus. “I’m used to pain.”

Steve punched her so hard and fast in the ribs the operative crumpled to floor and retched and Steve grabbed her by the dislocated shoulder and dragged her back to standing in a few seconds. Sweat poured from her forehead with the effort of not screaming out, holding her breath.

“So am I,” he said. He wasn’t apologizing. 

Natasha had never appreciated that he was as much of a survivor as she was.

_“Yo, where you guys at?”_

Natasha sucked in a deep breath, clicking the coms on. “Second floor, I need your help.”

Steve turned on her. “Get out.”

“I know what you’re doing, but this-”

“They aren’t talking.” Flat, unseeing, his eyes turned back to the operative. Natasha holstered her gun, marching forwards.

“Rogers, this isn’t going to work.”

“It will.”

“This is my area, and I’m telling you-”

“Go.”

“I’m trying to help, I know what you want-”

“Do you?”

She looked at him. Breathing light and fast, his chest rose and fell as if he were still 5’4” and asthmatic, but his eyes were narrow and focussed. She’d bet his hands would shake if he held them out in front of him.

“I’ll get everything she knows out of her. We’ll find him, Steve.”

Steve took a shuddering, deep breath, and his shoulders slumped. “We don’t know if he’s alive.”

The operative steadied her breath. “One time he remembered your name. We wiped him, but he kept chanting it until they did. He said it was important, he knew it was important.

“Then he forgot your name, and he killed a family while they slept. Wouldn’t you rather him dead?”

It took Natasha a moment less to react, but Steve’s raw power stripped hers of all effect, batting her away and grabbing the operative’s broken wrist and snapping it in the wrong direction, the scream smacking against Natasha, but he pressed his forearm into her throat, her wrist back on itself, roaring in her face, demanding to know everything she did.

Natasha knew. There was no weight on his back, no vines wrapped around his spine, no flowers crushed. It would be better if there were. It would tether him to something, it would press him into the ground, it would keep him present. He didn’t build a new life because he didn’t want it, he didn’t want any of it, not if Bucky couldn’t have it all too. He was angry.

Sam helped her rip Steve away, dragging the operative out before Steve killed her, but Steve only stopped trying when he broke Natasha’s collarbone in landing a swing. She flinched back from him, grabbing it, and he hesitated, and they looked at each other. Hand steady, she traced a finger along the bone, and winced at its displacement. Steve stopped, hand scrabbling around for the chair and slumping into it, face in his hands. They called in backup and started the clean-up job without him.

***

It took two months, solitary confinement, and one threat to a family member Natasha promised herself she wouldn’t actually hurt to break the operative. The Winter Soldier hadn’t returned, but one undercover agent thought he had a lead on the man a few months before. He went missing hours after that message got through, and was presumed dead.

Steve took it to mean he was free, at least. He was the only one who saw it a truly good thing, an amnesiac assassin roaming free, but at least some of his smiles weren’t sad.


End file.
